Introduction

It is a familiar and depressing story: the poor blamed for poverty and more, for taking resources from everybody else.

When a £500-a-week benefit cap was introduced in April 2013 by Haringey Council in North London, one of the first local authorities in the UK to try it, ‘Susan’ and ‘Samantha’ decided to step forward and let the local benefit justice campaign highlight their cases. The details were shocking enough, showing the hardship people across the borough would be facing. For both, single mothers with a number of children, the effect of the cap was to leave them having to find money for their housing costs out of their already tight budgets. As the benefit justice campaign explained to its supporters on its Facebook page, Susan, who has seven children, used to get £537 in benefits per week, plus £245 in housing benefit. The £500 cap took £282 away and left her with £245-worth of rent to find out of her £500 maximum benefits, and so £255 for everything else. That’s well below a minimum decent standard of living (the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimates that to get this, a single parent with three children would need £458 a week) and between eight people, works out at under £32 each for the week.

With facts like these, Susan and Samantha could have expected a sympathetic hearing from the campaign’s Facebook followers. Some did indeed agree that this was a disgraceful way for a rich country to treat its poorest citizens, but there were plenty of opposing views. ‘Does this woman with 4 kids and no income think that life is any different for those of us that fund her extravagant lifestyle choices?’ asked one commenter about Samantha.

When there’s less money around we all have to make sacrifices. I do two jobs to keep my family afloat. I also have to pay towards the upkeep of her family. Sorry, but I want my family to come first. I work. Why did she have 4 kids when she has no income with which to support them? I am totally gobsmacked at her insistence that she must stay in one of the world’s most expensive cities at our expense, while we all have to make more and more sacrifices to fund her extravagances.

The verdict on Susan, with her large family, was even worse (all spelling and ellipses in originals).

I have to say I believe that having seven children when you are on a low income is totally irresponsible…It does not take an Einstein to work out that when your house is getting full you STOP having more children.

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So why do you have a kid with a complete loser Susan? Responsibility is a two way street…People should put the children first, but the welfare system was not devised for large families with no income parents, that’s why we need a social security system that actually logs what the individual pays in, thus creating a culture of wanting to work….the more you pay in…the more security you gain. There should be a minimum level of support…but we need a system of fairness, not just…entitlement.

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Why should tax payers pay for someone to have 7 children and has never contributed in her life! Sounds like another sponger that thought she could pop out kids left right and centre and expect to be paid for! Back fired slightly! Good let it be a lesson to those with the same attitude that you can’t pop them out and expect everyone else to pay for you!!!

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If your on the dole and you cannot afford to have kids then u shouldnt be able to churn them out like no tomorrow…. Something needs to be done…. Up and down the country there are people churning them out just to get more money because they beleave the state owes them something, yet we see these people with drink, fags, tattoos etc etc…. Knock all that shite on the head for a start….

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She should have kept her fucking legs together and got a job people like this make me sick.

Unsurprisingly, both women were shocked by the vituperative response they received, and neither is now prepared to raise their heads above the parapet again. In part, of course, this story is simply illustrative of man’s web-based inhumanity to man, but it has also a wider significance as a demonstration of how far the idea of the deserving and the undeserving poor has got into people’s heads. It seems to be a common view that, as one of the Facebook commenters said:

Those who maintain unhealthy lifestyle choices and do not seek to reign anything in, are the ones who do nothing to support the original arguement. Those who genuinely need the support, who have fallen on hard times, and are willing to contribute a bit of effort, without hesitation are the ones who deserve to be supported. The rest need to understand what ‘responsibility’ is!

The ‘undeserving’ here are those who are perceived not to be willing to work, as Susan and Samantha were charged with being, but also those who have ‘unhealthy lifestyle choices’ through insufficient self-restraint; in other words, who eat and/or drink too much.

That benefit recipients are effectively being told to get off their fat behinds and work can seem so unremarkable that it’s easy to overlook its significance. There is a line from the crude abuse levelled at Susan and Samantha, through government austerity programmes, to a growing view of who is to blame for climate change and global hunger. In the years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 ushered in the economic crisis, governments across the Western world have attempted to convince us that the problems have been caused by overspending, and that now we all have to sacrifice in order to get the economy back on track. Phrases like ‘tighten our belts’ and ‘balance the budget’ have been commonplace. The idea is to make us equate the national budget with our personal finances, underlining the notion that the crisis of the system was the fault of individual consumers on a spending spree. This attempts to make the austerity agenda understandable: if ‘we’ have all overspent, it follows that ‘we’ have to cut back, whether that’s accepting job losses and pay freezes, sacrificing libraries or arts funding, or denying those on benefits luxuries like more bedrooms than the government thinks they need.

The hypocrisy of a government of multi-millionaires telling us that ‘we are all in this together’ is evident, but the argument was not developed solely to allow Tories to pose as men of the people. The idea that crises of the system are caused by the self-indulgence of individuals, and therefore can be solved by those individuals just changing their behaviour, has a long pedigree in green issues. In this sense, those who attempt to blame economic crises on people who are perceived to have chosen to be a burden on the system are using a way of thinking which is already common in discussions about climate change. This is a view of climate change which sees it as arising primarily from individual behaviour; people ‘choosing’ high-emission lifestyles who therefore need to be cajoled out of them like people ‘choosing’ to have children while living on benefits.

The shelves of books advising people on how to reduce their personal carbon emissions might give the impression that this view of the causes of environmental destruction is hegemonic, but in fact its value has always been contested. From a tactical perspective, an influential report, Weathercocks and Signposts, issued by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in 2008, argued that making small changes might not lead most people to go on to make more significant alterations to their lifestyles. For most, it suggested, the small changes might be all that they would do before they stopped, feeling that they had ‘done their bit’.1 Others have pointed out that while the ideology of capitalism maintains that the consumer is all-powerful, this is not necessarily true in practice: individuals have less power to change their own lifestyles, let alone the system in which they live, than these arguments would have it. With an interesting synchronicity, however, this view of ecological crisis as the product and responsibility of individual lifestyles was given new impetus just at the time that the economic system was lurching into crisis.

In September 2008, as Lehman Brothers were filing for bankruptcy, we learned that climate change was largely caused by that most individual of consumption choices: what we eat. Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), argued in a lecture that livestock farming was such a problem for the climate that everyone should have one meat-free day a week, as a step towards cutting their meat consumption even further.² These comments were essentially echoed by other authorities and were widely reported in the press, with headlines like ‘UN says eat less meat to curb global warming’,3 ‘Meat must be rationed to four portions a week’⁴ and ‘Government advisor: eat less meat to tackle climate change’.⁵ At the same time, the Food Climate Research Network issued what would prove to be a very influential report arguing that the food system in the UK was responsible for 19% of our greenhouse gas emissions. This was against the background of dramatic global food price rises, which led to demonstrations and riots in countries from El Salvador to Indonesia as people protested at the cost of staple goods soaring beyond their reach. Undoubtedly, this contributed to a general sense of a food crisis; the idea that the world had arrived at the point where environmental depredation had finally meant that we lacked the ability to feed everyone.

The effect of this was to place the idea of food production as a significant problem, if not the most significant contribution to ecological crisis, firmly within the mainstream. It has not proved a flash in the pan; that food is a major climate change issue is now a given in much of the media. It’s difficult to over-stress just how marked a shift, in such a short time, this is, elevating one area of modern production to centre-stage from its previous peripheral role. So minor was food’s contribution to climate change previously considered to be, compared to areas like power generation or transport, that comprehensive works like George Monbiot’s Heat (2006)⁶ or Jonathan Neale’s Stop Global Warming. Change the World (2008)⁷ scarcely accord it a mention. Even a work devoted to individual lifestyle changes, like Chris Goodall’s How to Live a Low-Carbon Life (2007), keeps the question of emissions reductions from dietary changes to sixteen pages, after the chapters on heating, lighting, household appliances, cars, public transport and aviation.⁸

In many ways, of course, the addition of food production to our understanding of climate change problems is both good and inevitable. As scientists gain more and more understanding of how the immensely complex climate mechanisms work, and how human activity is affecting them, what we have to do in mitigation and minimisation will change. Ultimately, however, climate change is a political problem as much as it is a scientific and technical one. The task is not simply to identify how we are damaging the climate, or to invent technical fixes for it, but to make structural changes which will enable us to implement specific solutions and construct a different relationship with the natural world. This is an intensely political challenge, and it means that new revelations, like that of the contribution of food to greenhouse gas emissions, are not simply objective, scientific facts but arguments with significance for the sort of solutions for climate change we call for and the sort of society we want to build.

In the first place, we have to be aware that food is a morally-loaded category in a way not shared by any other climate change villain. Considerations of the food system are replete with comments like this one from the Soil Association’s 2010 report on the food crisis: ‘Eating is a primal, physical act, but it is also a moral one. It reflects who we are – our character, our values and our ethics’.9 Aside from the climate implications, there is little morality associated with power use or even with car use: we don’t judge anyone’s worth according to how they heat their house, and do so according to their SUV ownership principally for climate change reasons. However, what we eat is associated with ideas about our value as people. Eating healthily, however that is understood, is frequently presented as a moral good, as an example of virtuous, responsible behaviour. The concomitant is that eating unhealthily is perceived as a moral failure, along with obesity as visual evidence of this guilt. The understanding that different foods make a significant contribution to climate change fits into this already-established moral framework for eating, so that, as the BBC News website once had it, ‘Obese blamed for the world’s ills’.¹⁰ Proponents of dietary change as a response to climate change are clearly aware of this: in 2009, for example, Lord Stern predicted that meat-eating would become morally unacceptable because of its effect on the climate, in the same way that drink-driving was once regarded as a foible and has now become a crime.11

Concerns about obesity coupled with the moral loading of food choices mean that the role of government and other authorities in hectoring people about diet is well-established. Outside of climate concerns we do not expect to be lectured about our transport choices, but we are told what we should and shouldn’t eat on a daily basis. One immediate effect of this is that a greater prominence of food in climate change campaigning casts individual lifestyle changes, as opposed to changes at the level of the system, as most important. So in the 2008 coverage of the food and climate change issue, it was clear that if food production was the problem, a dietary shift away from meat was the solution.

To a degree, it could be argued that this was a media creation. Media coverage will seize on the most populist angle, and it is not surprising that the press would think that the idea that people would be expected to change what they eat would sell more papers than a headline about reform of farming practices. But the concentration on dietary shifts did emanate from the original material, however much it was seized on in the media coverage. Indeed, in November 2008, Rajendra Pachauri teamed up with Paul McCartney to write to The Independent that becoming vegetarian would be ‘the single most effective act’ that anyone could take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.¹²

The discovery of diet as a cause of climate change gives a fillip to the notion of sacrifice for the sake of the climate. It is probably fair to say that the notion that we will have to sacrifice our Western living standards to address climate change is a truism for much of the green movement, whether this is achieved through individuals choosing to change their lifestyles or through system change in which such sacrifices would be mandated. The concept of different foods as sinful pleasures is so ingrained into our thinking about food in general that the conclusion that we will all have to sacrifice our current diets seems to have been an easy one to reach. It’s notable that in much of the discussion of food and its impact on the climate, what is characterised as a typical Western diet (high in fat and sugar, lots of junk food, lots of red meat) is viewed as both uniquely bad for the climate and uniquely desirable. There is an underlying assumption that everyone in the world would eat this way if they were able to; but such is its power to damage the climate that actually, no one should.

This matters because the notion of sacrifice goes to the heart of the matter. There is a long-standing tradition, going back to the post-Second World War period, of identifying Western overconsumption as a serious problem for the world, even before the reality of climate change was understood. The idea of sacrifice in climate change is often seen in terms of luxury consumption driven by advertising – yes, we don’t want to immiserate people, but we all buy high-end electrical goods that we don’t really need, right? However, an analysis of how food works within the overconsumption discussion reveals that it has a distinct effect on the class identification of those who are deemed to be overconsuming.

Another extremely important development in campaigning on climate change has been the emergence of the idea of climate justice. The idea that Westerners have to sacrifice to stop climate change is often seen as part of this justice agenda, on the grounds that we are taking more than our fair share of the world’s resources and leaving the poorest people in the world to deal with the consequences of our consumption. There is a lot in this argument, and I would not for one moment wish to minimise the sincere commitment of people in the green movement to justice and fairness. However, the question of who sacrifices and what they have to sacrifice is a key one. David Cameron’s ‘we’re all in this together’ hides an austerity agenda deliberately focused on attacking the poorest and most vulnerable in order to protect the wealth of the richest. In the same way, the notion that everyone in the rich West is guilty of overconsumption and can comfortably sacrifice conceals enormous differences between those promulgating the argument and those who are being expected to change. The necessity of tackling climate change can be used to justify attacks on ordinary people, if it’s their consumption which is defined as problematic. Climate justice and sacrifice, as revealed by the food issue, may not be compatible.

At a time when working people are under attack from the government’s austerity agenda, the danger is real that casting food choices as a major cause of climate change provides another layer of justification for cuts. The focus on food as an issue for climate change must be seen in the context of longstanding arguments about the malign effects of overconsumption, both on the planet and on individuals, which have themselves become increasingly focused on edible as opposed to luxury consumption. This has the effect of shifting the identification of the overconsumers from the rich to the working class, since obesity is overwhelmingly identified as a problem of the poorest people in the West. We are back, it seems, with Malthus’ idea that the problems of the world are caused by the appetites of the poor.

Part of the Malthusian view of the world is the fear that we are at the limit of the planet’s carrying capacity: that whether because of greed inherent in human nature or simply because of numbers, there are now too many people for us all to be fed. On the contrary, I argue that it is capitalism, not the human population, which is straining the natural limits of production. The situation with capitalist production tells us very little about what production under a different system might look like, but we can be confident that without the wastefulness and inequality which are part of capitalism’s makeup, our ability to feed the world’s population decently and fairly would be greatly increased. It is not particularly helpful, however, to opine about how much better off we would be in a non-capitalist system without some suggestion about how we might get there. I conclude therefore with some consideration of the environmental movement and how people who care about climate change and justice can best fight back against the system we face.